A non-compliance charge on a delivery is not a penalty in the contractual sense; it is the cost of work the warehouse did not plan for, passed back to you. Every departure from the announced shipment forces somebody into a manual step: recounting, restacking, remarking or investigating. Amazon sets the schedule and the amounts in the fee documentation inside the seller account, and only that version is binding.
Where the charge comes from
A high-throughput warehouse works on one principle: every unit follows the same repeatable path. Scan, read, put away. As long as a delivery fits that rhythm, the cost of receiving it is predictable. When a pallet needs anything outside the rhythm, somebody has to set it aside and deal with it separately, and that is a person and a floor space. The charge is the price of that interruption. The same mechanism runs in any warehouse that bills receipts per unit, as we describe in the article on pallet-in and pallet-out billing.
One consequence surprises people: a charge can appear even where the delivery went through the gate without trouble. Acceptance and compliance are two separate judgements, made at different moments.
Which deviations start at the pallet and in transport
- A unit count different from the one announced, most often because a pallet was rebuilt or split en route and the shipment was never corrected.
- Dimensions and weight outside the declaration, so the unit does not fit the handling path it was meant to take.
- Marking that is unreadable or wrong: a label under film, on a fold, damaged by moisture, or left over from a shipment that was cancelled.
- A pallet that has to be broken down by hand, because the layers shifted, the base is damaged or the load hangs over the edge, which we unpack in the article on overhang beyond the pallet footprint.
- A delivery outside its window or without a booking, which ties up a bay meant for somebody else.
Every one of these shares a trait: it starts before the gate and can be ruled out before loading. The set of requirements for the pallet itself is collected in the article on Amazon pallet requirements in the UK.
What the charge does not cover
It does not cover costs on the transport side, and those can be larger. Waiting at the gate, a second delivery attempt, storage while a new appointment is found and the labour of putting pallets right are settled separately, between shipper and carrier, on the terms of the order. Nor does it cover preparation work on individual retail units: that is the job of the seller or of a specialist prep operator, not of a carrier. We work at pallet and outer-case level, which we set out in the article on the limits of our warehouse service.
Where the binding list lives
We do not quote names or amounts of individual charges, because Amazon changes them independently of us and a guide with figures in it ages within months. The binding source is the fee documentation and requirement pages in the seller account, checked on the day the shipment is planned. The rule we apply internally is the same for pallet dimensions as for charges: before we send, we look at the current version, not at what applied on the previous delivery.
How we rule them out before departure
The pre-loading check covers four things and takes a quarter of an hour per pallet: unit count against the announced shipment, footprint and height, readability of the marking once the film is on, and the condition of the base. Where something departs from the specification, the correction happens in a warehouse, not in the consignee yard. On the British side we do that in Milton Keynes, and the sequence is described in the article on pallet preparation before an Amazon delivery. What happens when a delivery is stopped anyway is set out in the article on the stages of a refusal.
Sources
- Amazon Seller Central UK: fee documentation and shipment preparation requirements
- Amazon: FBA fee structure, with full rates held in the seller account
Want to cut the number of non-compliances on your UK deliveries? Describe the shipment in the quote form and we will check the goods before loading. The channel is described on the Amazon UK deliveries page.
